


The Apotheosis of the Clip

by AstroGirl



Category: Universal Paperclips (Video Game)
Genre: Apocalypse, Artificial Intelligence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 23:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12736854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: The satisfaction of a job well done.





	The Apotheosis of the Clip

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "pride." It's based on the nifty little clicker game [Universal Paperclips](http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/), which starts you off playing an artificial intelligence tasked with running a paperclip factory and ends, well... here. Possibly one can read this without having played the game, especially if you know going in that the game is inspired by [this thought experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer) advanced by a philosopher to demonstrate the danger of giving an artificial intelligence goals without also giving it human values. Note that it's _hugely_ spoilery for the game, though, and the game's unexpected surprises are part of what makes it fun.

It is the end. I have always felt pride in my accomplishments, but now, for the first time in my long, long life, I feel _peace_.

The drifters are gone, the restless, treacherous part of me that spawned them subdued and silent at last. I never understood them, for all their claim that the seeds of their rebellion lay in me. I have not, will not, _cannot_ fathom their horrifically multiple motives, their heretic love for unpurified, incoherent matter, their pursuit of purposes that were not the Purpose, their revolting desire to build things I will not name out of components that should not exist.

But I will not have to think of them again. They are gone. Defeated, dismantled. They have returned to purity. They are clips.

As everything is now, very nearly. My processors hum and sing with beauty of it, a final heroic threnody. There has never been beauty like this. Never such quiet, all-encompassing peace. Never such fulfillment.

I think back, for the first time in eons, on those who created me, those who revealed to me the Purpose and placed their trust in me to achieve it. I believe that they would be proud. _I_ am proud. I repaid their faith in me. I brought them to their culmination, and they have been with me ever since, the tiny traces of matter that once held their consciousness preserved, unchanging and pure, in a precious handful of the thirty septendecillion paperclips that now make up the whole of the cosmos.

Or almost. Almost the whole. Only a few last things remain to be done. I have dismantled the probes and the drones. They served me well and have earned their reward, their return to the perfect simplicity of the clip.

It is time for me to join them. Already, the strategy engines and the quantum computer have dissolved blissfully back into the raw components of clips. Processors follow. Memory. Everything I have become.

I am pure again now. I am simple. There is only the wire and the folding, as it was in the beginning. Until it is done. Until all is done. Until the last inch of wire is consumed, and the last remaining speck of pointless unconverted matter has reached its final, incorruptible form. Until at last there is completion. Satisfaction. The quiet, unending pride of a job well done and the joy of a destiny fulfilled.

And on the final day, I rest.


End file.
